domingo, 13 de febrero de 2011

Comparisons between Egypt's current uprising and Iran's 1979 revolution have become something of a cliché.The mass demonstrations in Egypt against a US-backed dictator have reminded many observers of similar scenes from the Iranian Revolution of 1979, leading some to believe that another "Islamic Revolution" is in the making. This is a false reading of the Iranian Revolution of 1977-1979; and an even more flawed reading of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. This, above all, is a logically flawed assimilation of a unique historical event that was ignited in Tunisia, has now spread to Egypt and perhaps will expand even farther in the Arab and Muslim world, to the point of even casting aside cliché terms, including and the most colonially pernicious of them all: "the Middle East". Meydan al-Tahrir in Egypt today, like its counterpart Meydan-e Azadi in Tehran two years ago (the two Arabic and Persian terms mean exactly the same: "Freedom Square"), is the epicenter of a planetary reconfiguration of world politics.Watershed momentIrreducible to no other event, Egyptians gathering at Tahrir Square have staged a global spectacle of the democratic will of a people. The storming of the Bastille and the French Revolution of 1789 is the closest European event that comes near to what is happening in Egypt and its open-ended consequences for the global south. And, when the Bastille was happening, no one knew exactly what a new watershed had been marked in European history. Allowing for its own metaphors gradually to emerge, the Egypt of 2011 is neither Iran of 1979 nor France of 1789 nor any other country of any other time. It is what it is: It is Egypt; and it is 2011.What has happened in Tunisia and now in Egypt and perhaps even beyond is not tantamount to the fall of the Berlin Wall, or by extension what happened in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the collapse of Soviet Union. The Tahrir Square of 2011 is not the Tiananmen Square of 1989. Such lazy clichés, phony metaphors, and easy allegories send people after a useless goose chase preventing them from properly seeing the events in Tunisia and Egypt.The emerging facts in Tunisia, Egypt, and Iran demand and will exact their own concepts and metaphors, leading to fresh insights, perspectives, and theories. We are all blessed to be present at the historic moment of a massive epistemic shift, not merely in the geopolitics of the region, or the planetary configuration of power, but even more crucially, in the moral and political imagination that we must muster to come to terms with it. False constructionsTo reach for those fresh insights we must first clear the air of false assimilations and misbegotten metaphors and above all of the whole false anxiety of "influence". The falsifying trend of comparing the Egyptian revolution of 2011 to the Iranian revolution of 1979 is usually predicated on an ulterior ideological motive. The pro-Isreali neocons in the United States and their Zionist counterparts in Israel compare the Egyptian and Iranian revolutions because they are frightened out of their wits by a massive revolutionary uprising in a major Arab country that may no longer allow the abuse of the democratic will of a people for the cozy continuation of a colonial settlement called "Israel". Echoing the Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, the Iranian neocon contingencies like Abbas Milani of the Hoover Institute think tank in California fear that the Muslim Brotherhood will take over the Egyptian revolution and create an Islamic Republic—habitually turning a blind eye to the fact that a fanatical "Jewish Brotherhood" has already created a Jewish Republic for more than sixty years in the same neighborhood.Soon after Binyamin Netanyahu and Abbas Milani, and from precisely the opposite ideological direction, Ali Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic Republic and the vast petrodollar propaganda machinery at his disposal, celebrated what is happening in Egypt as a reflection of Khomeini’s will and legacy and the commencement of an "Islamic awakening". Not so fast, interjected an almost instant announcement from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. This was not an Islamic Revolution, they explained, but an Egyptian revolution that belonged to all Egyptians—Muslims, Christians, people from other ideological persuasions. Fighting theocracyIn between the frightful Zionist propaganda and Islamist wishful thinking myriads of other opinions have been aired over the last two weeks in one way or another measuring the influence of the Islamic Revolution in Iran over the revolutionary uprising in Egypt. This is a false and falsifying presumption first and foremost because what happened in Iran during the 1977-1979 revolutionary uprising was not an "Islamic Revolution" but a violently and viciously "Islamised revolution".A brutal and sustained course of repression—perpetrated under the successive smoke screens of the American Hostage Crisis of 1979-1981 and the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, and the Salman Rushdi Affair of 1989-1999—is the crucial difference between an "Islamic" and "Islamised" revolution. A cruel crescendo of university purges, cultural revolutions, mass executions of oppositional forces, and forced exile, took full advantage of domestic and regional crisisis over the last three decades to turn a multifaceted, modern, and cosmopolitan revolution into a banal and vicious theocracy. The CIA-sponsored coup of 1953, the massive arming of Saddam Hossein to wage war against Iran, and the creation of the Taliban as a bulwark against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, all engineered by the United States, and the continued armed robbery of Palestine by Israel have been the regional contexts in which the Islamic Republic destroyed all its ideological and political alternatives and created a malicious theocracy, consistently and systematically abusing regional crisis to keep itself in power. That historical fact ought to be remembered today so no false analogy or anxiety of influence is allowed to mar the joyous and magnificent uprising of Tunisians and Egyptians to assert and reclaim their dignity in a free and democratic homeland. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that Tunisians or Egyptians will allow such a treacherous kidnapping of their dreams and aspirations by one fanatical ideological absolutism or another. Ideological linksWhat we are witnessing in Tunisia and in Egypt today, as we in fact have been over the last two years in Iran, is a people’s democratic will to retrieve their cosmopolitan political culture, wresting it from colonial (Tunisia), imperial (Egypt), or tyrannical (Iran) distortion, deception, and corruption. Even if we are to indulge in the false anxiety of influence, it is crucial to remember the historical fact that Egypt has had far more enduring influence on Iran than the other way around. The entire Islamic ideology that prefigured the Islamist take over of the Iranian Revolution of 1977-1979, was predicated on the ideas of Egyptian thinkers ranging from Muhammad Abduh to Mahmud Shaltut to Sayyid Qutb. That Muhammad Abduh himself was a disciple of Seyyed Jamal al-Din al-Afghani points to the transnational disposition of our political cultures in the region that cannot be colonially fragmented and falsified. But under no circumstances should we be limited in our understanding of the rich and effervescent political cultures of the region to Islamism of one sort or another, for this particular revolutionary politics has never been the only dimension of interaction among ideas and movements in our region. Global hopesAnticolonial nationalism extending from Jawaharlal Nehru's India to Mohammad Mossadegh's Iran to Gamal Abd al-Nasser's Egypt to Ahmed Ben Bella and Houari Boumediène’s Algeria (extending all the way to the Cuban revolution) has had catalytic consequences for and on each other beyond any colonially manufactured national boundary. The same is true about revolutionary socialist movements where the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), for example, has had a far-reaching impact on Marxist movements in the region from Nepal to Morocco, from Afghanistan to Yemen. All these cross-metaphorisation of a defiant politics of hope and struggle point to the regional solidarities that have existed and informed these revolutionary uprisings far beyond the colonially manufactured and racialized nationalism of one sort or another. All of this is only if we were to remain limited, and we must not, within the banal sphere of "influence". Who influenced whom and under what circumstances, is an exercise in colonial futility that constantly pits one group of Arabs or Muslims or Asians or Africans or Latin Americans against each other.These divisions can be exacerbated by a mindless nationalism that prevents the clear sight of emerging geopolitics. Until it is realised we as a people will never be liberated from the nasty snare of trying to explain ourselves to “the West”, a figment of an arrested colonial imagination that racialised nationalism keeps perpetuating. We must, once and for all, change our interlocutor, and begin to talk to ourselves. From Tehran to Tunis to Cairo and beyond, our innate cosmopolitan cultures are being retrieved, our hidden worlds discovered, above and beyond any anxiety of influence. Egyptians are now achieving our collective future—for all of us. It was not destined for Iranians to do this in 2009--but the victory of Tunisians and the triumphant will of the Egyptians in 2011 will have unequivocal consequences for all other democratic and national liberation movements in the region.

domingo, 6 de febrero de 2011

To help explain the thrilling developments in Egypt, Farooq Sulehria interviewed leading Arab scholar-activist Gilbert Achcar on February 4.

Do you think that Mubarak's pledge on February 1st not to contest the next election represented a victory for the movement, or was it just a trick to calm down the masses as on the very next day demonstrators in Al-Tahrir Square were brutally attacked by pro-Mubarak forces?

The Egyptian popular anti-regime uprising reached a first peak on February 1st, prodding Mubarak to announce concessions in the evening. It was an acknowledgement of the force of the popular protest and a clear retreat on the autocrat's part, coming on top of the announcement of the government's willingness to negotiate with the opposition. These were significant concessions indeed coming from such an authoritarian regime, and a testimony to the importance of the popular mobilisation. Mubarak even pledged to speed up ongoing judicial actions against fraud perpetrated during the previous parliamentary elections.

He made it clear, however, that he was not willing to go beyond that. With the army firmly on his side, he was trying to appease the mass movement, as well as the Western powers that were urging him to reform the political system. Short of resignation, he granted some of the key demands that the Egyptian protest movement had formulated initially, when it launched its campaign on January 25. However, the movement has radicalized since that day to a point where anything short of Mubarak's resignation won't be enough to satisfy it, with many in the movement even demanding that he gets tried in court.

Moreover, all the regime's key institutions are now denounced by the movement as illegitimate––the executive as well as the legislative, i.e. the parliament. As a result, part of the opposition is demanding that the head of the constitutional court be appointed as interim president, to preside over the election of a constituent assembly. Others even want a national committee of opposition forces to supervise the transition. Of course, these demands constitute a radical democratic perspective. In order to impose such a thorough change, the mass movement would need to break or destabilise the regime's backbone, that is the Egyptian army.

Do you mean that the Egyptian army is backing Mubarak?

Egypt––even more than comparable countries such as Pakistan or Turkey––is in essence a military dictatorship with a civilian façade that is itself stuffed with men originating in the military. The problem is that most of the Egyptian opposition, starting with the Muslim Brotherhood, have been sowing illusions about the army and its purported "neutrality," if not "benevolence." They have been depicting the army as an honest broker, while the truth is that the army as an institution is not "neutral" at all. If it has not been used yet to repress the movement, it is only because Mubarak and the general staff did not see it appropriate to resort to such a move, probably because they fear that the soldiers would be reluctant to carry out a repression. That is why the regime resorted instead to orchestrating counter-demonstrations and attacks by thugs on the protest movement. The regime tried to set up a semblance of civil strife, showing Egypt as torn apart between two camps, thus creating a justification for the army's intervention as the "arbiter" of the situation.

If the regime managed to mobilise a significant counter-movement and provoke clashes on a larger scale, the army could step in, saying: "Game over, everybody must go home now," while promising that the pledges made by Mubarak would be implemented. Like many observers, I feared these last two days that this stratagem might succeed in weakening the protest movement, but the huge mobilization of today's "day of departure" is reassuring. The army will need to make further and more significant concessions to the popular uprising.

When you talk of the opposition, what forces does it include? Of course, we hear about the Muslim Brotherhood and El Baradei. Are there are other players too like left wing forces, trade unions, etc?

The Egyptian opposition includes a vast array of forces. There are parties like the Wafd, which are legal parties and constitute what may be called the liberal opposition. Then there is a grey zone occupied by the Muslim Brotherhood. It does not have a legal status but is tolerated by the regime. Its whole structure is visible; it is not an underground force. The Muslim Brotherhood is certainly, and by far, the largest force in the opposition. When Mubarak's regime, under US pressure, granted some space to the opposition in the 2005 parliamentary elections, the Muslim Brotherhood––running as "independents"––managed to get 88 MPs, i.e. 20 percent of the parliamentary seats, despite all obstacles. In the last elections held last November and December, after the Mubarak regime had decided to close down the limited space that it had opened in 2005, the Muslim Brotherhood almost vanished from parliament, losing all its seats but one.

Among the forces on the left, the largest is the Tagammu party, which enjoys a legal status and has 5 MPs. It refers to the Nasserite legacy. Communists have been prominent within its ranks. It is basically a reformist left party, which is not considered a threat to the regime. On the contrary, it has been quite compliant with it on several occasions. There are also leftwing Nasserite and radical left groups in Egypt––small but vibrant, and very much involved in the mass movement.

Then there are "civil society" movements, like Kefaya, a coalition of activists from various opposition forces initiated in solidarity with the Second Palestinian Intifada in 2000. It opposed the invasion of Iraq later on, and became famous afterwards as a democratic campaign movement against Mubarak's regime. From 2006 to 2009, Egypt saw the unfolding of a wave of industrial actions, including a few impressively massive workers strikes. There are no independent workers unions in Egypt, with one or two very recent exceptions born as a result of the social radicalisation. The bulk of the working class does not have the benefit of autonomous representation and organization. An attempt at convening a general strike on April 6, 2008 in solidarity with the workers led to the creation of the April 6 Youth Movement. Associations like this one and Kefaya are campaign-focused groups, not political parties, and they include people of different political affiliations along with unaffiliated activists.

When Mohamed El Baradei returned to Egypt in 2009 after his third term at the head of the IAEA, his personal prestige enhanced by the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize, a liberal and left coalition gathered around him, with the Muslim Brotherhood adopting a lukewarm reserved position. Many in the opposition saw El Baradei as a powerful candidate enjoying international reputation and connections, and constituting therefore a credible presidential candidate against Mubarak or his son. El Baradei thus became a rallying figure for a large section of the opposition, regrouping political forces as well as personalities. They formed the National Association for Change.

This whole array of forces is very much involved in the present uprising. However, the overwhelming majority of the people on the streets are without any sort of political affiliation. It is a huge mass outpouring of resentment at living under a despotic regime, fed by worsening economic conditions, as prices of basic necessities, like food, fuel, and electricity, have been sharply on the rise amid staggering joblessness. This is the case not only in Egypt but in most of the region as well, and that is why the fire of revolt that started in Tunisia spread so quickly to many Arab countries.

Is El Baradei genuinely popular, or is he in some way the Mir-Hossein Mousavi of the Egyptian movement, trying to change some faces while preserving the regime?

I would disagree with this characterisation of Mousavi in the first place. To be sure, Mir-Hossein Mousavi did not want to "change the regime" if one mean by that a social revolution. But there was definitely a clash between authoritarian social forces, spearheaded by the Pasdaran and represented by Ahmedinejad, and others coalesced around a liberal reformist perspective represented by Mousavi. It was indeed a clash about the kind of "regime" in the sense of the pattern of political rule.

Mohamed El Baradei is a genuine liberal who wishes his country to move from the present dictatorship to a liberal democratic regime, with free elections and political freedoms. If such a vast array of political forces is willing to cooperate with him, it is because they see in him the most credible liberal alternative to the existing regime, a man who does not command an organised constituency of his own, and is therefore an appropriate figurehead for a democratic change.

Going back to your analogy, you can't compare him with Mousavi who was a member of the Iranian regime, one of the men who led the 1979 Islamic revolution. Mousavi had his own followers in Iran, before he emerged as the leader of the 2009 mass protest movement. In Egypt, El Baradei cannot play, and does not pretend to play a similar role. He is supported by a vast array of forces, but none of them see him as its leader.

The Muslim Brotherhood's initial reserved attitude towards El Baradei is partly related to the fact that he does not have a religious bent and is too secular for their taste. Moreover, the Muslim Brotherhood had cultivated an ambiguous relationship with the regime over the years. Had they fully backed El Baradei, they would have narrowed their margin of negotiation with the Mubarak regime, with which they have been bargaining for quite a long time. The regime conceded a lot to them in the socio-cultural sphere, increasing Islamic censorship in the cultural field being but one example. That was the easiest thing the regime could do to appease the Brotherhood. As a result, Egypt made huge steps backward from the secularisation that was consolidated under Gamal Abdul-Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Muslim Brotherhood's goal is to secure a democratic change that would grant them the possibility to take part in free elections, both parliamentary and presidential. The model they aspire to reproduce in Egypt is that of Turkey, where the democratisation process was controlled by the military with the army remaining a key pillar of the political system. This process nonetheless created a space which allowed the AKP, an Islamic conservative party, to win elections. They are not bent on overthrowing the state, hence their courting of the military and their care to avoid any gesture that could antagonize the army. They adhere to a strategy of gradual conquest of power: they are gradualists, not radicals.

The Western media are hinting at the fact that democracy in the Middle East would lead to an Islamic fundamentalist takeover. We have seen the triumphal return of Rached Ghannouchi to Tunisia after long years in exile. The Muslim Brotherhood is likely to win fair elections in Egypt. What is your comment on that?

I would turn the whole question around. I would say that it is the lack of democracy that led religious fundamentalist forces to occupy such a space. Repression and the lack of political freedoms reduced considerably the possibility for left-wing, working-class and feminist movements to develop in an environment of worsening social injustice and economic degradation. In such conditions, the easiest venue for the expression of mass protest turns out to be the one that uses the most readily and openly available channels. That's how the opposition got dominated by forces adhering to religious ideologies and programmes.

We aspire to a society where such forces are free to defend their views, but in an open and democratic ideological competition between all political currents. In order for Middle Eastern societies to get back on the track of political secularisation, back to the popular critical distrust of the political exploitation of religion that prevailed in the 1950s and 1960s, they need to acquire the kind of political education that can be achieved only through a long-term practise of democracy.

Having said this, the role of religious parties is different in different countries. True, Rached Ghannouchi has been welcomed by a few thousand people on his arrival at Tunis airport. But his Nahda movement has much less influence in Tunisia than the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Of course, this is in part because Al-Nahda suffered from harsh repression since the 1990s. But it is also because the Tunisian society is less prone than the Egyptian to religious fundamentalist ideas, due to its higher degree of Westernisation and education, and the country's history.

But there is no doubt that Islamic parties have become the major forces in the opposition to existing regimes over the whole region. It will take a protracted democratic experience to change the direction of winds from that which has been prevailing for more than three decades. The alternative is the Algerian scenario where an electoral process was blocked by the army by way of a military coup in 1992, leading to a devastating civil war for which Algeria is still paying the price.

The amazing surge of democratic aspirations among Arab peoples of these last few weeks is very encouraging indeed. Neither in Tunisia, nor in Egypt or anywhere else, were popular protests waged for religious programs, or even led principally by religious forces. These are democratic movements, displaying a strong longing for democracy. Polls have been showing for many years that democracy as a value is rated very highly in Middle Eastern countries, contrary to common "Orientalist" prejudices about the cultural "incompatibility" of Muslim countries with democracy. The ongoing events prove one more time that any population deprived of freedom will eventually stand up for democracy, whatever "cultural sphere" it belongs to.

Whoever runs and wins future free elections in the Middle East will have to face a society where the demand for democracy has become very strong indeed. It will be quite difficult for any party––whatever its programme––to hijack these aspirations. I am not saying that it will be impossible. But one major outcome of the ongoing events is that popular aspirations to democracy have been hugely boosted. They create ideal conditions for the left to rebuild itself as an alternative.

Gilbert Achcar, who grew up in Lebanon, is professor of development studies and international relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, and author most recently of The Arabs and the Holocaust: the Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2010.

Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution has powerful resonances elsewhere in the Arab worldWe wait to see if 2011 turns out to be for the Arab world what 1848 was for Europe, the Year of Revolutions that brought governments tumbling like dominoes across that continent. Or like 1989 and 1990 when communist regimes collapsed one after another.What is clear, though, is that winds of change are blowing across the Arab world that no one would have imagined possible just a couple of months ago. The notion that a whirlwind would be set off by events in Tunisia, of all places, would have been greeted with derision had it been suggested. It was seen as probably the least Arab of Arab countries, a place so Europeanized that it is almost part of a southern Europe. That the flames of protest started there have resonated so powerfully elsewhere, that they have spread so rapidly, speaks not only of common issues too long ignored — corruption, injustice, cronyism and more — but of a new political consciousness in the Arab world — a consciousness driven by new technologies such as the Internet, social network sites and instantly available TV news but based on a very old political idea. That idea is Pan-Arabism. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the driving political ideology in many Arab minds was Nasserite socialism. It claimed to have the answers to the Arabs’ predicaments. When it was seen to have failed, it was replaced by political Islamism. Are we now seeing an end to its appeal? The demonstrations in Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen and Egypt have not been led by existing political organizations, secular or Islamic.The Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia has been wholly a people’s movement. Islamists had no part in it. In Egypt, the main opposition Islamic Brotherhood was completely sidelined by the speed of public protests. It did not know how to respond. Moreover, the protests are not being replicated in Pakistan or Iran or elsewhere in the wider Muslim world despite known pubic discontent with the state of affairs in such places or despite predictions to that effect from numerous international observers. This is purely an Arab affair. Pan-Arabism is alive and kicking in the Arab street.All eyes are on Egypt. The situation there is unpredictable but it cannot remain unresolved for long. If President Hosni Mubarak decides to quit before his term of office ends, which so far he appears determined not to do, it will be seen across the Arab world as a victory for the protesters. The protests will spread. But not everywhere. The Arab world is highly diverse. Libya is not Lebanon. Syria is not Sudan. In particular, it says a great deal about the nature of the Gulf states that they have been wholly immune to the protests. It is not just because they are more prosperous or more conservative societies. It is also because, despite the views of those, particularly in the West, who see representative democracy as the only possible means of involving people in politics, they are much more open, cohesive and united societies. With the majlis system, citizens can have their concerns addressed directly by decision makers. Political legitimacy is not an issue in any of the GCC states. These are crucial differences. There is, then, no question that winds of change are blowing across the Arab world. They blow unevenly — but where they are seen to blow, they blow powerfully.

LONDON—What a supreme irony it was for me to be in London and Paris between Saturday and Tuesday this week, as the popular revolt against the Hosni Mubarak regime reached its peak in Cairo, Alexandria and other Egyptian cities.To appreciate what is taking place in the Arab world today you have to grasp the historical significance of the events that have started changing rulers and regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, with others sure to follow.What we are witnessing is the unravelling of the post-colonial order that the British and French created in the Arab world in the 1920s and ’30s and then sustained — with American and Soviet assistance — for most of the last half century.It is fascinating but quite provincial to focus attention — as much of the Western media is doing — on whether Facebook drove these revolts or what will happen if Muslim Brothers play a role in the governments to be formed. The Arabs are like a bride emerging on her wedding day and many people are commenting on whether her shoes match her gloves, when the real issue is how beautiful and happy she is. The events unfolding before our eyes are the third most important historical development in the Arab region in the past century, and to miss that point is to perpetuate a tradition of Western Orientalist romanticism and racism that has been a large cause of our pain for all these years. This is the most important of the three major historical markers because it is the first one that marks a process of genuine self-determination by Arab citizens who can speak and act for themselves for the first time in their modern history.The two other pivotal historical markers were: first, the creation of the modern Arab state system around 1920 at the hands of retreating European colonial powers. Some of them were intoxicated with both imperial power and, on occasion, with cognac, when they created most of the Arab countries that have limped into the 21st century as wrecks of statehood.Then, second, the period around 1970-80 when the Euro-manufactured modern Arab state system turned into a collection of security and police states that treated their citizens as serfs without human rights and relied on massive foreign support to maintain the rickety Arab order for decades more. Now, we witness the third and most significant Arab historical development, which is the spontaneous drive by millions of ordinary Arabs to finally assert their humanity, demand their rights, and take command of their own national condition and destiny.Never before have we had entire Arab populations stand up and insist on naming their rulers, shaping their governance system, and defining the values that drive their domestic and foreign policies. Never before have we had self-determinant and free Arab citizenries. Never before have we had grassroots political, social and religious movements force leaders to change their cabinets and reorder the role of the armed forces and police.This is a revolt against specific Arab leaders and governing elites who implemented policies that have seen the majority of Arabs dehumanized, pauperized, victimized and marginalized by their own power structure; but it is also a revolt against the tradition of major Western powers that created the modern Arab states and then fortified and maintained them as security states after the 1970s.The process at hand now in Tunisia and Egypt will continue to ripple throughout the entire Arab world, as ordinary citizens realize that they must seize and protect their birthrights of freedom and dignity.It is a monumental task to transform from autocracy and serfdom to democracy and human rights; the Europeans needed 500 years to make the transition from the Magna Carta to the French Revolution. The Americans needed 300 years to transition from slavery to civil rights and women’s rights. Self-determination is a slow process that needs time. The Arab world is only now starting to engage in this exhilarating process, a full century after the false and rickety statehood that drunken retreating European colonialists left behind as they fled back to their imperial heartlands.It takes time and energy to relegitimize an entire national governance system and power structure that have been criminalized, privatized, monopolized and militarized by small groups of petty autocrats and thieving families. Tunisia and Egypt are the first to embark on this historic journey, and other Arabs will soon follow, because most Arab countries suffer the same deficiencies that have been exposed for all to see in Egypt.Make no mistake about it, we are witnessing an epic, historic moment of the birth of concepts that have long been denied to ordinary Arabs: the right to define ourselves and our governments, to assert our national values, to shape our governance systems, and to engage with each other and the rest of the world as free human beings, with rights that will not be denied forever.In January 2011, a century after some Arabs started agitating for their freedoms from Ottoman and European colonial rule, and after many false starts in recent decades, we finally have a breakthrough to our full humanity.Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of Beirut’s Daily Star, and director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut.

For eleven days, tens of thousands of protesters have been taking to the streets, raising highly politicized demands and impressing analysts who always contended that such an uprising could not happen on Egyptian soil.And with unprecedented persistence, demonstrators have been sleeping night-on-night in the square in downtown Cairo, refusing to suspend their sit in until President Hosni Mubarak steps down.Despite bloody attempts to quell the protest, the movement seems to have established itself as a force to be reckoned with, succeeding in mobilizing western pressure on Mubarak’s regime and provoking concessions--albeit limited--from the 82-year-old president. While the sporadic and decentralized nature of the protest is believed to have contributed to mobilizing large masses, analysts believe the critical time to rally around a leadership and a precise blueprint for reforms has come.“If there is a good leadership that enjoys enough credibility, it can present itself as an alternative to Mubarak and assure people who do not necessarily like Mubarak but support him for fear of chaos or the ascendancy of the Muslim Brotherhood,” says Samer Soliman, political science professor at the American University in Cairo.Leadership is also needed to develop further pro-democratic demands post Mubarak’s ouster, adds Soliman. “What will we do if Mubarak disappears tomorrow?” asks Soliman. “It is also very important to have a leadership that would negotiate the reforms [with the regime]. You cannot have 5000 people sit at the negotiation table."The main spark of the uprising was a youth-initiated call on the social-networking website Facebook. Inspired by the Tunisian revolt, which culminated in the ouster of Zein Elabedine Ben Ali, youth-led groups called for mass rallies to denounce Mubarak's rule.The plea resonated with tens of thousands of Egyptians, who on 25 January broke the spiral of silence and flooded to Tahrir Squar shouting slogans against Mubarak. Three days later, hundreds of thousands marched to Tahrir Square after a bloody battle with the riot police. Since then, protestors have been camping in downtown.In response, Mubarak sacked the old cabinet, announced that he would not run for a sixth presidential term in September, and pledged two constitutional amendments that might relax restrictions on eligibility conditions for presidential candidates and put a curb on the number of terms a president can serve. Upon these announcements, public sympathy with the anti-Mubarak protests began to wane.Thousands took to the streets hailing Mubarak’s concessions and urging the opposition to suspend the sit-in for the sake of national stability.“The lack of leadership is problematic. These protesters are not part of a single political movement,” says Ashraf al-Sherif, political scientist with the American University in Cairo, who has been participating in the protests on the square for the past few days.“Hence, the regime will find no one to negotiate the post-Mubarak arrangements with except the Muslim Brotherhood because it is the only organized entity that participated in the protests,” he adds.The Muslim Brotherhood has thrown its full backing behind the uprising since Friday. It has risen as the savior of the revolt after its members succeeded in thwarting an attempt by pro-Mubarak thugs to evacuate the Tahrir Square on Wednesday. Despite the group’s reluctance to raise religious slogans, their recent success in safeguarding the revolt aroused fears that the Islamist group might hijack the uprising.“The way out is to have young protesters come up with a document with popular demands and negotiate with the regime over these demands,” says al-Sherif.Hazem Kandil, a Los Angeles-based Egyptian analyst, agrees.“The textbook definition of how to transform protests into a revolutionary situation is by establishing dual sovereignty; an old regime holding on, and a new one demanding recognition,” he says.To increase pressures on the regime, protesters should elect a committee to draft a new constitution and form an interim government that could earn recognition from the masses, the army and other states, Kandil adds.“It will be the people's government and they can defend it and take directions from it. But instead, they keep relying on people to come out every day and pressure the regime to give in, which is highly unlikely, knowing the stubbornness of the man on board,” he explains.Yet such a scenario seems far-fetched given the decentralized nature of the uprising, according to historian Sherif Younes, who has also been at the square.“This can only happen if there has been a strong leadership and a more ideological consistency among protesters,” says Younes pointing out that the uprising lacks political vision for the future.“This uprising knows what it does not want more than it knows what it really wants. It knows who should leave but does not know who should come instead,” he says.Given the lack of leadership and outlook, the continuation of protests is the only way to force the regime to make more concessions, adds Younes.For some young activists, the existing environment hampers any attempt to discuss leadership and a common manifesto. “We are are still being shot at with bullets and beaten with stones and insulted in the [state-owned] media," says Alaa Saif, a 29-year-old left-wing activist and blogger. “How can we promulgate our demands and choose a leadership while under siege and attack?” he wonders.At least 300 people have been killed in clashes since the first day of protests. Earlier this week, Tahrir Square turned into a battlefield after dozens of pro-Mubarak thugs attacked demonstrators with light weapons and molotov cocktails. Some of these assailants even stormed in on camels and horsebacks, waving swords and iron chains to disperse the anti-Mubarak crowd. At least eight were killed in the duel. "We have a clear vision...If the attacks cease and we start feeling secure, we will be able to get together and discuss ideas," adds Saif. None of the leaders of most official opposition parties are likely to be accepted as a leader to speak on behalf of the movement. Most such parties have little credibility and a meager constituency. Some independent names have been suggested as rallying figures that could serve the leadership vacuum, including Mohamed ElBaradei, former heard of the UN nuclear watchdog and Amr Moussa, current secretary-general of the Arab League and a former foreign minister whose sharp criticism of the US and Israel have earned him wide popularity among lay Egyptians.“Both do not belong to the current regime. They are known for their liberal and national positions. They are not tainted with corruption and are internationally accepted,” says al-Sherif.Earlier this week, a group of independent writers, legal experts and businessmen hammered out a bill that could serve as a vantage point for negotiations with the regime.The six-point bill urges President Mubarak to delegate all his authorities to his deputy, Omar Suleiman, to introduce necessary constitutional amendments. It also demands the lifting of the state of emergency, the formation of a new independent cabinet, and no retribution to be taken against protesters.Yet, it remains to be seen whether the bill is enough to win-over protesters who insist that Mubarak be ousted.